Greetings Programs, With reading week just around the corner, there are some awesome upcoming events and things to be aware of! --- * Racket's Magical match, by Theo Belaire, Monday, 2nd of February, 2015. In MC 4063 at 6:00pm. Theo Belaire, a fourth-year CS student, will show you the basics of how this amazing function works, and help you get your feet wet with some code examples. He will also cover some more advanced use cases and a little bit about the performance of match. If you’re interested in knowing about the more powerful features of Racket, then this is the talk for you! The material covered is especially useful for students in CS 241 who are writing their compiler in Racket, or are just curious about what that might look like. * (Hosted by the SCS) Making Robots Behave, by Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Thursday, 5th of February, 2015. In DC1302, 3:30-4:30pm. The fields of AI and robotics have made great improvements in many individual subfields, including in motion planning, symbolic planning, probabilistic reasoning, perception, and learning. Our goal is to develop an integrated approach to solving very large problems that are hopelessly intractable to solve optimally. We make a number of approximations during planning, including serializing subtasks, factoring distributions, and determinizing stochastic dynamics, but regain robustness and effectiveness through a continuous state-estimation and replanning process. This approach is demonstrated in three robotic domains, each of which integrates perception, estimation, planning, and manipulation. --- Your chairbeing extraordinaire, Calum T. Dalek.